Pending Criteria/settings to limit email validation

[Alfa1]

If I'm understanding it correctly then email validation is done for all accounts, every 6 months.
Because this can quickly rack up costs, please consider to implement a few settings to limit which email accounts are validated:

• Do not validate emails for registered in the past X months.
• Do not validate emails for users emailed in the past X months.
• Do not validate emails for users with user state: X,Y,Z
• Validate maximal X emails per hour/day/month.

 

[DragonByte Technologies]

Hello @Alfa1,

Thank you for your suggestion for DragonByte Mail. Your request will be reviewed by a member of our team shortly.

Unless there are any problems preventing these features from being added to the product, this thread will not receive another reply until it is time to review logged feature requests for implementation.

We appreciate you taking the time to help us improve our products!


- DragonByte Tech Staff

 

[Alfa1]

Settings to exclude email verification for accounts that:

1. Have been emailed in the past X months.
2. Are banned
3. Have bounced user state.
4. Have receive news updates disabled AND have not visited for X years.
5. Have confirmed their email within the last X months.
6. Has been validated within the last X months.

 

[Fillip H.]

It's definitely something to take into consideration. It's somewhat complicated by the fact that I do need to have the aforementioned criteria always apply, and there is no clear way to communicate to users that certain criteria are forced.

Furthermore, I don't want to encourage or allow a situation where someone might say "Well I'm only sending mass emails to usergroup X so I only need to validate them", which ignores all of the normal XenForo emails that the user will not receive if their email is bouncing.

For example, let's say you need to send a sitewide notice that your site has been compromised and everyone should reset their passwords. Are you only going to send such a critical email to people who signed up for your newsletter? I would argue that such an important email should also bypass the "Receive emails from administrators" setting.
You would end up with potentially thousands of emails bouncing and being in trouble with Amazon, if you only validated a portion of your user base. Ask me how I know

 

[Fillip H.]

Are banned

Already excluded.

Have bounced user state.

Already excluded.

Have receive news updates disabled AND have not visited for X years.

Should not be excluded due to the points in my aforementioned post.

Have confirmed their email within the last X months.

An argument could be made that changing your email with email confirmation enabled should be logged as a validated email, sure.

Has been validated within the last X months.

Already excluded.

 

[Alfa1]

For example, let's say you need to send a sitewide notice that your site has been compromised and everyone should reset their passwords. Are you only going to send such a critical email to people who signed up for your newsletter? I would argue that such an important email should also bypass the "Receive emails from administrators" setting.
You would end up with potentially thousands of emails bouncing and being in trouble with Amazon, if you only validated a portion of your user base.

Yes, you have a point there. But thats still the purvey of the webmaster to decide if they want to make such an investment or not. As the costs could rack up in hundreds or even 1k of euro's this goes beyond the capabilities of most webmasters. But lets say this occurred and the webmaster does want to make the investment, then this still is a rare occasion. It makes no sense to validate members who will normally not be emailed ever. Especially considering steep costs occurring every 6 months. For my site I would spend €100 every 6 months for no benefit at all. Over the years/decades that adds up. That's €2k over the course of a decade. I would much rather spend those 2k on nice addons or custom development, than pointlessly wasting it.

I would much rather spend that €100 only when its needed.

Question:
Are addresses with the following bounce statuses validated:

1. awaiting confirmation
2. awaiting confirmation from edit
3. awaiting approval
4. rejected
5. disabled

And what happens if an account with awaiting confirmation status is validated and found valid? Is the status then changed to valid? And if yes, then does the member get an email that their forum account is valid now and can be used?

 

[Fillip H.]

Users with any state other than valid are not validated. There is currently no "pre-registration validation" as that would allow someone to financially ruin you by typing in garbage emails over and over again until you run out of credits.